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According to Bloomberg on June 2, Benjamin Melman, global chief investment officer (CIO) of asset management institution Edmond de Rothschild, revealed that the company has been overweighting NVIDIA since the end of 2020, but has now partially profit-taking, and its position is now "much smaller."
Asset management institution Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management may be a little strange, but its owner is famous, the Rothschild family, a veteran financial family with a history of more than 200 years!
Since the beginning of this year, Nvidia's stock price has risen by more than 170%. On May 29, NVIDIA's market capitalization even exceeded one trillion US dollars, becoming the seventh company in the United States to unlock this achievement after Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple and Tesla.
For many asset management institutions, AI valuation is obviously too high, and it is reasonable for some long-term investors to choose to "drop their pockets for safety". Contrary to the bears, a number of top banks have recently raised their future stock price expectations for NVIDIA.
As Nvidia's stock skyrocketed, so did Nvidia's founder and CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth has now grown by $21.1 billion, making him 37th on the list of the world's richest people.
In the months when NVIDIA bucked the trend, Huang Jenxun, an already famous business leader, became a real figure:
His guest speech at the graduation ceremony of NTU made people talk about it and became a new social currency of the circle of friends; And the video of him meeting the anchor's sister on the street dominated the screen for several days on the ranking of station B.
He was admitted to university at the age of 16, founded his own IT company at the age of 30, went public at the age of 36, and the company entered the trillion-dollar market capitalization club after 30 years of entrepreneurship and still held the CEO position...
Huang's experience is quite legendary, but his success is not accidental, nor is it smooth sailing.
In 1963, Huang was born in Taiwan, China, into an ordinary family. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother was an elementary school teacher. Since he was a child, the family has a strong knowledge atmosphere, and his parents are also quite concerned about his learning.
As a child, he moved with his family to Thailand, and because of the turmoil, he was sent to the United States by his parents at the age of nine with his brother, who lived with his uncle in Washington.
The uncle's family was not financially well, so he sent the brothers to a rural boarding school in Kentucky.
Mr. Huang said in an interview that the school was more like a correctional home, and many of the children in it were troubled teenagers, many carried knives with them, and some had tattoos all over their bodies.
However, he also said that the school taught him to be strong and adaptable, which was an experience that had a positive impact on the rest of his life.
Two years later, Mr. Huang's parents came to the United States, and his life was finally on track. He entered a regular school, and he was very popular with his classmates with excellent character and learning, and he was also very talented in sports, and also won the third place in the youth category of the National Table Tennis Competition.
He was admitted to Oregon State University, where he majored in electrical engineering. After graduation, he entered Stanford University and obtained a master's degree.
After graduating from college in 1983, Jensen went to Silicon Valley. At that time, the computer industry was in the ascendant, Silicon Valley was not as prosperous as it is today, Intel was still a junior, and the predecessor Microsoft had just sold MSDOS to IBM.
Huang chose AMD as a chip designer. Two years later, he joined LSI Logic, where he worked for 8 years.
In the past eight years, Huang has worked in many positions, from the engineering department to the sales department, and the rotation of positions has taught him how to integrate product development with the market, which has also laid the foundation for his own future entrepreneurship.
While at LSI Logic, Jensen Huang met two engineers at SUN, Chris and Pream. The three often meet at a café off the Silicon Valley highway to imagine the future.
In 1993, at the instigation of these two friends, Huang decided to start a company engaged in graphics chip development, named Nvidia, which means "Envy" and also means "Next Version".
Chris served as vice president, Pream served as chief technology officer, and Jensen Huang became president and CEO because he knew both technology and sales.
Mr. Wong promised his wife that he would own a company by the age of 30, and he did. In commemoration, Huang Jenxun also deliberately chose to take office on his 30th birthday.
At that time, most people were not optimistic about the industry, and Huang Jenxun consulted experts about the graphics chip market and future trends, but was discouraged:
Because the market had not yet started at that time, twenty or thirty similar companies on the market were in chaos, and if they joined rashly, the risk of failure was great.
Huang still embarked on this path without hesitation, and regarded this insistence as the most correct time for his stubbornness.
In 1995, NVIDIA introduced its first product, NV1. Huang Jenxun hoped to use this product to set off a revolution in the industry, but it didn't even get much recognition and didn't make much splash.
At its most difficult, NVIDIA had only enough money to run for 30 days. The company struggled, and Mr. Huang had to lay off two-thirds of its employees. But Huang never doubted himself and eventually persevered, saying, "If failure doesn't knock you down, it will make you grow."
Just when the company was struggling, the Japanese game giant Sega extended an olive branch and offered $7 million in the hope that NVIDIA could develop chips to cope with the pressing of Nintendo and Sony.
Because the industry is developing rapidly and changeably, Huang found that the chips they developed deviated from the mainstream market and were simply not compatible with Microsoft's just-released Windows 95 Direct 3D technology.
So Huang Jenxun approached Sega's CEO at the time, Shoichiro Ikyo, to explain, saying that the technical route was wrong and he hoped to redevelop it.
But he also said that the company is too difficult now and hopes that Sega can pay normally. To Wong's surprise, Sega actually agreed, and he later said: "It made us live six more months."
This past story, Huang Jenxun also said at the graduation ceremony of National Taiwan University, he used this past story to tell the graduates at the scene:
"Facing your mistakes and humbly asking others for help saved Nvidia, and that attitude is the hardest for those of you who are smart and successful."
With the time and money it bought, NVIDIA built the third-generation RIVA 128, the first high-performance 128-bit graphics chip to support Microsoft's Direct3D graphics interface.
The product received an excellent market response and received full support from Microsoft, with 1 million units shipped in 1997. Taking this as an opportunity, NVIDIA and TSMC began a 25-year cooperation.
On this road, Huang Jenxun went further and further, launching one chip product after another with excellent performance.
After that, Huang Jenxun proposed the famous Huang's law - the performance of graphics chips doubles every 6 months. This law is similar to the famous Moore's Law, but evolves 3 times faster!
This almost crazy product update speed has caused many manufacturers who cannot keep up with the pace to leave, and NVIDIA continues to consolidate its position as an industry leader.
People in the industry say that Huang Jenxun is aggressive and does not give his peers a way to live. But he said, "I never wanted to crush an opponent, I just thought about how to solve some of the most important problems in the world." ”
In Huang's view, only by doing what you love can you have passion, challenge the most difficult and important problems, and ultimately change the world.
In 1999, NVIDIA went public on the NASDAQ. Huang Jenxun, who continues to improve, also launched a chip with a new architecture - GeForce 256, taking the lead in bringing the chip industry into the GPU era.
Three years later, NVIDIA chip shipments exceeded 100 million, making it the fastest growing semiconductor company in history. With his outstanding record, Huang's worth skyrocketed to $507 million, crowding into Fortune magazine's list of the richest people under the age of 40 in the United States.
Today, NVIDIA is already a leader in GPU design, with more than 80% of the discrete graphics card market.
NVIDIA's products are also expanding into the video games, professional visualization and automotive industries, among which NVIDIA on-board computers have been used as the basis for self-driving cars.
As "the most aggressive Chinese in Silicon Valley," Huang has only four important things in his life: working, thinking, helping others, and creating. In his view, if you want to make a difference, you need to create your own path, not repeat the same path that others have taken.
Huang's often phrase is, "Remember, we're only 30 days away from going out of business" to motivate employees.
At first, NVIDIA just wanted to build the best 3D graphics chips for gamers around the world. But slowly, Huang discovered that scientists could also use GPUs to accelerate their more complex and massive calculations.
In late 2006, Jensen Huang opened up GPUs to software developers, launching the CUDA platform, which allowed them to use the computing power provided by NVIDIA for purposes other than graphics.
To this end, NVIDIA invested 6 years regardless of the cost, and the stock price even performed for many years, and shareholders were skeptical of CUDA and wanted NVIDIA to focus on improving profitability. Huang led LinkedIn Weida to withstand the pressure and took all risks to pursue deep learning.
Because of the high cost of the technology, investors questioned that "no one used it at all" until 2012, when AI researchers discovered and began using CUDA, and by 2016, the industry generally realized that it was a transformative feature.
Years later, the AI revolution began, and Nvidia became the engine of propulsion. We invented CUDA for AI, a journey that forged our character, and endured pain and suffering that was necessary on the way to pursue our vision. ”
In the face of huge industry opportunities such as virtual currency, metaverse and AI explosion, NVIDIA led by Huang Jenxun has not missed any wave of popular technology boom.
As the planner and leader of the company's way forward, Jensen Huang is quite accurate and mature in judging the industry and future technology trends.
Many Silicon Valley bigwigs have obvious dressing characteristics, such as Jobs likes black turtlenecks, Zuckerberg often wears gray short sleeves. Huang, on the other hand, wore a black leather coat as "semi-permanent."
Whether on the cover of magazines, public speaking, or everyday life, Jensen Wong's leather coat is never absent. He himself played the meme, answering questions from netizens online on Reddit, claiming that I was the "man in leather".
Speaking at NTU a few days ago, Huang Jenxun was still wearing a leather jacket. He shared with NTU students three setbacks and difficulties he and Nvidia have encountered along the way.
He said that how to face failures and setbacks is the key to NVIDIA surviving and growing from an ordinary technology company to a great company leading scientific and technological innovation.
In his speech, Jensen Huang had many expectations and encouragement for the graduates with his own insights:
"In 40 years, we've created personal computers, networks, mobile devices, cloud technologies. What will you create in the current era of AI? Whatever it is, go all out to pursue it like we did, run! Don't walk slowly. ”
"On your journey, take with me some of the mistakes I've made and the experiences I've had. I hope you will face failure with humility, admit your mistakes and ask for help. You will endure the pain and suffering required to achieve your dreams and make sacrifices to commit to a meaningful life and dash your life's cause. ”
For the first half of his life, Huang Jenxun has been constantly forging ahead without stopping.
As he himself said, "Run for food, or not be treated as food by others." You often don't know which situation you're in, but keep running no matter what. ”